Combatting Shame with Empathy through Story-telling

In this episode, I wrap up Season 3 by reflecting on how we can reduce shame by building empathy, and how telling our stories and listening to the stories of others is a tool to do just that. I share more about my own story, and look ahead to January when Femammal will return for Season 4.

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• Email femammalpodcast@gmail.com
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Logo design: copyright Darragh Hannan

Transcript

[Greer]

Hi, this is Greer, your host for Femammal, the podcast that holds space for women to explore what it means to live well in our bodies and celebrates moving through this world as female mammals.

We have made it to the end of season three, friends! Thank you for joining me as we listened to women sharing authentically about their experiences moving through this world as female mammals. We've heard resilient, brave, and joyful stories of specific health conditions, of struggles with our sexual experiences, and of chosen paths that have helped women feel more fully alive, and more fully connected in their bodies. I wanted to spend a few minutes at the end of this season reflecting on what is so powerful about listening to these stories, even when the focal point may be a health condition you may personally never experience.

I've been reading Brene Brown's Atlas of the Heart—shout-out to my sister, Darragh Hannan, who gave me a copy for my birthday this year, and who also did all of the artwork for this podcast! Atlas of the Heart is a sort of encyclopedia making sense of the complex emotions we experience throughout our lives. It illuminates what can be healthy and adaptive about certain feelings, and what can be destructive or insidious about others. Developing this vocabulary for our emotional lives is a helpful step towards feeling less controlled by our emotions, and dismantles some of the walls we may have put around difficult emotions. It's important to feel our feelings and move through them in a healthy way, and I've often felt that my menstrual cycle forces me to do that on a monthly basis, because of the way that my hormone peaks and valleys tend to shift me towards different types of emotions and different intensities of emotion throughout the month. 

The information that Brene Brown shares on shame, empathy, and connection clarified for me why listeners feel so drawn to download this podcast episode after episode, no matter the topic. So many of my guests have openly shared their feelings of shame, or ways in which they have been shamed, because of the health conditions they face. Or, even if they wouldn't put the name “shame” on the difficult emotions they have experienced, they have talked about human connections that have been broken because of what they're struggling with, or feeling disconnected from their own bodies. There's often a sense of judgment or unworthiness that goes along with the vulnerable experiences they have shared, and the emotional impact it's made on their lives. 

Brene Brown defines shame as, quote, “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection,” and she identifies empathy as “the antidote to shame.” But it's hard to bask in the connecting warmth of empathy without letting our guard down, sharing our stories, and having our stories received without judgment, in a way that affirms our dignity and value as human persons. Only we can ascertain when it might be safe to be vulnerable in that way, and even then it takes courage to share stories that come with an undercurrent of shame. But doing so can begin to unwind the self-judgment and isolation that are wrapped up in shame. 

And I've noticed that I feel shame far more often that I've actually been shamed or humiliated by another person—this horrible feeling is self-imposed far more often than it's inflicted. We observe our society's values, we hear the comments that people make about stories in the media, we see the way that other people have been treated, or we remember a judgmental comment that a specific person made to us, and we conclude that if people knew such-and-such about me, then they would exclude me, too, or they would judge me unworthy of love, and then I would lose out on the sense of human connection that's more important to me than almost any other feeling. So we don't tell our stories. We don't give people the opportunity to judge and exclude us. We try to protect ourselves, and all the while the shame is undermining our capacity for human connection from the inside. Sometimes shame feels like a monster in the shadows, lying in wait, and the more we try to hide it or avoid it, the closer it lurks and the bigger it gets.

Even when it may not be safe to share our shame-inducing stories, or even when we haven't found the right person to share it with, there is still so much healing power in listening to the stories that others have bravely shared, and witnessing the affirmation they have received when they've opened up. Even if we're not ready to say something, hearing our own experience reflected in another person's story can bring our own “dark secrets” a little bit farther into the light. We recognize that we're not the only woman going through this, we recognize that in hearing another woman's story our own reaction is one of empathy, and it makes it a little bit easier to extend that empathy to ourselves. 

Sometimes a small detail can be powerful. A woman with a very different diagnosis than mine might share a symptom, or have gone through a similar intervention or procedure, and suddenly her whole predicament resonates with me. Sometimes the details don't matter at all—just listening to someone describe their dark feelings and the negative self-talk they battled while going through a health journey nothing like my own, can still make me feel so seen and understood. Their stories help to normalize our own experiences, which undermines the destructive narrative that I'm the only one going through this, or this single experience I'm going through makes me fundamentally flawed or unlovable. I hope that with each episode of this podcast, you are seeing a richer tapestry of human experience that affirms that no matter what you are going through, you matter, your pain matters, your joy matters, you belong in the human community and the community of women, and there is a longer horizon stretching out for your life than you can currently see. 

I had an experience like that of my own this fall. I've been very open about the fact that what inspired this podcast was my own struggle with a number of gynecological conditions, including dyspareunia, vaginisimus, and vulvadynia. While I've worked hard to pursue interventions that improve my symptoms, my reality is that because of my history with these conditions, attempts at penetrative sex range from frustrating to darn-near impossible, which was a deeply shame-inducing reality as a bride almost three and a half years ago. For a long time, it felt like a catastrophic problem that had to be solved at all costs, because according to the scripts of the culture that I was raised in, it somehow threatened the validity of my marriage, and my identity as a woman and a wife, let alone the possibility of motherhood. I felt a deep sense of unworthiness, and I felt disconnected from my body, disconnected from other women (especially other married women), and so isolated. 

It didn't help that all of this was unfolding at the beginning of a global pandemic! The pandemic meant that we didn't get to have a wedding reception when we got married in a tiny ceremony in front of immediate family, and there were a lot of nights when I felt like I didn't deserve to have a wedding reception anyway, at least not until we figured out how to make penetrative sex work.

Well, we didn't figure out how to make it work, but I did enough work on myself and shared my story enough that I finally realized that these health conditions don't need to have any impact on my self-confidence, my worth as a human being, the legitimacy of my marriage, the joy I take as a wife, or the enjoyment I get from the sex life that I do have with my husband. And overwhelmingly, when I have shared my story, I've received empathy, support, and sometimes even relief expressed by women who have gone through something similar. Certainly some people have said the wrong thing, or said nothing at all, which feeds the shame monster. But the response of support has been so huge, and the way it has connected me to other women and helped other women feel more seen, heard, and connected, shrinks the shame monster down to a tiny, pocket-sized gremlin I can manage. 

And this fall, 3 years, 3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days after my husband and I said our vows, we finally had our wedding reception. And it felt so good to be dancing in a room full of family and friends who were celebrating with us KNOWING what our REALITY is, instead of hiding our reality in shame and trying to perform some unrealistic version of ableist, patriarchal, heteronormative marital bliss that isn't authentic to our experience. It was honestly the most fun I've ever had at a party, and it was so evident that it was a space where everyone felt that they could authentically be themselves, because we have been openly and authentically ourselves. I'm so glad we didn't wait a moment longer to throw our party, because now when that tiny, pocket-sized shame gremlin tries to gnash his teeth, I remember how clearly our friends and our family sent us the message that our love and commitment deserves to be celebrated, regardless of what our sex life looks like or what our family looks like. I hope everyone who has shame about a similar health challenge, or identity, or life experience is able to have a moment of empathy, connection, and joy like that. 

And I can see the empathy and connection that you are cultivating across the globe by listening to this podcast, which has now reached 29 different countries! Femammal has had downloads in over 400 locations across six continents, and its reach just keeps growing. I'll be taking a break from posting new episodes until January, but I hope you'll take a moment sometime this holiday season to share an episode that was meaningful to you with someone who needs to hear it. I'm already recording episodes for Femammal's fourth season coming up in January, so go ahead and take some time to catch up on episodes you missed, and I will see you in the New Year! Thank you for listening; it means the world.

If today's episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at femammalpodcast@gmail.com that's femammalpodcast@gmail.com. You can also follow this podcast on Facebook. Just search for Femammal Podcast and you will find a community of people who are interested in living well in our bodies. And of course, I'd love for you to rate this podcast and leave a review wherever you download your podcasts. Until next time, be well.